incoherencies from an american ex-pat in exotic beijing, or: how i learned to stop worrying and love bureaucracy

Tuesday Jul 29, 2008

At last Thursday's Beijing OpenSolaris User Group meeting, we had three different perspectives on OpenSolaris.

Jim Hughes

Our first presentation was a special guest appearance by the always effervescent Jim Hughes, Sun Fellow and Solaris Chief Technology Officer. Jim outlined four features of OpenSolaris that make it such a compelling operating environment:

Familiarity (to those used a Linux look and feel)

ZFS Root

New patching mechanism

New packaging mechanism

And, gave some excellent background on each of them.
Here is a picture of Jim making a point about the OpenSolaris CD, and showing how to make a point without a pointer.

Aubrey Li

Aubrey Li, a Senior Software Engineer at the Open Source Technology Center of Intel in Shanghai then spoke about an OpenSolaris Developer's Start-up Guide which he wrote. Audrey also answered a lot of questions from folks in attendance.

Sun ZhongYuan

Lastly, Sun ZhongYuan, a member of the HCTS team at Sun, spoke about using OpenSolaris productively with such tools as VirtualBox and Wine.

Special credit goes to Simon Sun, who organized and hosted this month's meeting.

It was in large part due to conversations with Fiona and Tim that I decided to jump on the Eee PC bandwagon.

Like Tim, I started with an Eee PC 4G model (with 512 MBytes of memory). However, pretty much as soon as it arrived, I was off to ZhongGuanCun to purchase a 2 GByte memory upgrade, and, well, a 16 GByte SD HC card. With this new configuration, I also decided to install the (newly released) SXDE 1/08 software instead of the Project Indiana bits. And, well, take a look:

No tweaks were needed to get it going... specified the SD HC card as the install/boot device, and that was it.

I'm running pre-release bits for WiFi. The current bits have problems with the integrated Atheros chip.

The sound is a problem. Waiting on some upcoming OSS bits for that.

The darn thing panicked (CR 6662425) when I tried to boot into xVM. In the meantime, I'm gonna try to get VirtualBox going... see Joe Bonasera's blog about it here.

All in all, I'm extremely pleased with this machine. And, well, for a total price of under $US 500, I think it it rocks. (I'll be bringing it to the February 28th meeting of the Beijing OpenSolaris User Group, hopefully with a couple other nifty things running. :)